EMAIL: Since We Can’t Live WITHOUT it, Let’s Learn to “Live” WITH IT (3/15)

“Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Clearly, email is taking a tremendous toll not only through lost productivity but also on our health in terms of the stress and anxiety it induces.

If Email is So Costly to Productivity and Health, Why Don’t Corporations Abandon It?

Surprisingly — or not — some have tried, but the answer doesn’t lie in prohibition — email has too much to offer to take such draconian measures. 

Email, like any tool, needs to be understood. Only then can we learn to wield it to our advantage.

Earlier, we looked at dopamine (Understanding the Irresistible Call of Email) and how it can drive our addiction to constantly checking email. 

But there’s an even darker side to email that directly affects our health and well-being. All too often, email is responsible for causing a feeling of a loss of control, resulting in feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression. 

Understanding why email can have this effect is a major weapon against preventing or overcoming these powerfully negative outcomes.

Understanding Email: Why Does it Create Stress? 

Instant electronic communication is a part of our lives, so learning how to control technology and our relationship with it is paramount to a healthy and enjoyable life.

Although we’re constantly susceptible to intrusions from electronic media — such as instant messaging, cell phones, X, and email — studies, surveys, and the press always point to email as the stress-inducing culprit.

Why Email’s to Blame

Most of us are wired up like switchboards. We love the two-way exchange of instant messaging and communication, but our relationship with “email” is not nearly as straightforward.

In fact, it might be the perfect metaphor for a love-hate relationship. 

If we’re the sender of email, we love it. It’s fast, convenient, and oh so easy. However, if we’re the receiver, it’s frequently viewed as intrusive, uninvited, and unwelcome. 

Like an unannounced visit from an in-law, email walks into your life and demands attention. It infiltrates. It creeps into our personal lives, blurring the lines between work time, personal time, weekdays, and weekends. 

There’s an Intangible Quality to Email. 

The excitement of the unknown is accompanied by the dreaded feeling of “Now what?!” 

Invariably, incoming email leads to more work.

In fact, researchers have identified four ways that email creates additional work:

1. Since it’s easy to send and goes straight to the recipient’s inbox, the receiver has to read, sort, and file it. Email forces everyone to deal with these tasks regardless of their status.
2. Because it’s so easy to send, it frequently results in unsolicited requests, interruptions, and diverted attention, causing the receiver to shift gears and add new tasks to their current stack. (1, 2)
3. Interruptions take a massive toll on efficiency and time demands. Many employees set their email notifications at five-minute intervals — or worse — constant notification. In addition to the time these employees spend reading and managing messages — they require, on average, 64 seconds to resume work. This interruption rate and checking incoming messages caused 96 work stoppages in eight hours —  roughly an hour and a half of recovery time per day! (3, 4, 5, 6)
4. Email is often used to perform many tasks for which the program was not designed. For example, researchers found that people use email programs to keep track of to-do items, store documents, manage contact lists, and organize information.

In research studies on communication technology in the workplace, most participants said that cell phones, text messages, X and other devices blurred the line between office and home and disrupted their leisure time. 

And yet, the only complaint was about email.

“Often email overload gets to me. You get to the end of a day, and you’ve just spent six out of ten hours in meetings and the rest of it on conference calls, and you haven’t been able to deal with the emails. 

And then you got more than normal that day, and they’re all just piling up, and you feel like they all need you to do something. That’s where I end up working extra hours or coming in on the weekend to get on top of it. You just know that it won’t be a good week if you have to come in on Monday to that level of email.” (7)

Many participants in various studies said they worked from home early in the morning, late in the evening, and on weekends to empty their email inboxes, which prevented them from being overwhelmed by email when they got to work.

“Some participants who didn’t do email from home said they no longer did so. It was causing conflict with their loved ones, and rather than jeopardize those relationships, they accepted a ban on doing email from home.” (7)

The Anxiety of Email

Research on stress has shown that a feeling of loss of control and unpredictability are two of the leading causes of stress.

“Forty-five percent of our interviewees explicitly associated the volume of emails they received with a loss of control, which they articulated in terms of two anxieties: the fear of falling behind in one’s work and the fear of missing important information. Both anxieties were tied to the technology’s asynchrony, which enabled people to send messages at any time without disturbing the recipient. Worse, it allowed messages to continually accumulate until the recipient eventually processes them.” (7)

Groping for a Sense of Control

Some people claimed that responding to email in the evenings and weekends was their “solution” to stress management. They actually found it less stressful to work the extra hours on email because they couldn’t possibly relax when worrying that email was accumulating unrestrained.

Sadly, many people equated a clean inbox ( constantly emptying it) with being in control. They felt that keeping up with email — regardless of the hours spent doing so — eased their anxiety. It gave them a sense of being in control… even though it was a fleeting feeling since new emails were constantly landing. This is precisely why putting things in perspective is so crucial. 

We must ask ourselves if working evenings and weekends are really catching us up, or are we just getting behind in the non-email parts of our lives?

Are we falling behind in our relationships, hobbies, family time, and learning time at the expense of responding to email?

“I don’t blame technology. I blame the way we use it. You need a system to confront what I call screen-sucking  — literally being constantly drawn to a new hit of information… you don’t have to answer every email the minute you get it. And there is no reason that you have to deal immediately with every interruption that comes up. People don’t realize how much they’ve given up control and allowed their boundaries to be much too permeable.” (7)

~ Edward Hallowell, director of the Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health

References

1. Manger, T., R.A. Wicklund, Eikeland, O.J., “Speed Communication and Solving Social Problems,” Communications, 2003, 28(3): 323 – 337
2. Dabbish, L. A., Kraut, R.E., Fussel, S., Kiesler, S., “Understanding Email Use: Predicting Action on a Message,” Human Factors Comput. Systems: Proc. CHI’05. ACM, 2005, New York, 691–700
3. Jackson, T. W., Dawson, R., Wilson, D., “Improving the Communications Process: The Costs and Effectiveness of Email Compared with Traditional Media,” 1999, Proc. 4th Internat. Conf. Software Process Improvement, Res., Ed. Training 4INSPIRE’995, Heraklion, Crete, 167–178
4. Jackson, T. W., Dawson,R., Wilson, D., “Case Study: Evaluating the Use of an Electronic Messaging System in Business,” 2001, Proc. Conf. Empirical Assessment Software Engrg. ACM, New York, 53–5
5. Jackson, T. W., Dawson,R., Wilson, D., “The Cost of Email Interruption,” 2001b., J. Systems Information Technology 5(1) 81–92
6. Jackson, T. W., Dawson, R., Wilson, D., “Reducing the Effect of Email Interruptions on Employees,” Internet J. Inform. Management,” 2003, 23(1): 55–65
7. Barley, S., Myerson, D., and Grodel, S. “Email as a Source and Symbol of Stress,” Organization Science, 2011, 22(4):887–906